


dead stars looking up at the sky

by a_very_smol_frog



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Depression, Heavy Angst, Lost Love, M/M, Sad, Stars, no happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-23
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-13 05:14:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29646312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_very_smol_frog/pseuds/a_very_smol_frog
Summary: “What is human existence? It turns out it’s pretty simple: We are all dead stars, looking back up at the sky.” -Michelle Thaller
Relationships: Iwaizumi Hajime/Oikawa Tooru
Comments: 9
Kudos: 24





	dead stars looking up at the sky

**Author's Note:**

> Hello <3 I made myself cry while writing this.....so take that as you will. 
> 
> Thank you to [Lizzie](https://twitter.com/karasuno9_10) for betaing this. I am sorry for any emotional pain I may have caused you <3
> 
> GUYS! Look at this beautiful art [Futaa](https://twitter.com/Futatomato99/status/1366977569917083655?s=20) drew for this fic. It'll make you cry even more.

Hajime wakes up in the dark. It takes a moment for his vision to adjust, but slowly the edges of furniture and dirty laundry on the floor creep out from the shadows, the vague lumps, and corners hazily visible. He doesn’t even need to look at the clock to know it’s too early—or late depending on how you squint—for him to be awake.

His skin buzzes with restlessness, thoughts racing through his mind and dragging his consciousness along with them. He flips onto his stomach, stretching his arms under his pillow across the cool cotton sheets. The new position is comfortable for a few minutes before his mind picks back up from a slow jog to a full-on sprint. Turning onto his back doesn’t help either. Neither does clutching a pillow to his chest or kicking the blankets off his feet. 

Finally, he hauls himself out of bed; if he isn’t going to sleep, he might as well preoccupy his mind some other way. He pads out into the living room, not bothering to flick any of the lights on. If he does, it feels like he’s admitting defeat. Nighttime is reserved for the things people are too afraid to say in the light; under the hushed blanket of darkness, he doesn’t have to acknowledge that the demons lurking in the recesses of his mind have won again.

The couch isn’t nearly as comfortable, but the cool leather under his skin is a welcome feeling, the sturdy cushions against his back far better than the endless expanse of empty sheets in the other room. 

He pulls a blanket out of a basket under the coffee table and wraps it around his body. The sweet scent of apples smells wrong, but it doesn’t make him sick to his stomach like the lavender that saturates his pillow. In the morning he’ll throw his linens in the washer. 

The silence hanging in the house is deafening, so he clicks on the television, flipping it to a random channel. A nature documentary pulls up, one about the migration of butterflies in the Americas. It’s just interesting enough to keep his attention trained on the colorful fluttering of wings but still allows his mind to relax. About thirty minutes in he starts to doze off. He registers the show ending but doesn’t open his eyes until he hears the title of the next film narrated.

A rendered video of the solar system waltzes across the screen, showing the nine planets lazily drifting around the sun. 

Hajime’s heart leaps into his throat, swelling until he’s struggling for each breath. His brain is screaming at him to turn it off, and yet, he can’t rip his gaze away from the screen. A woman with a low smoky voice goes into a brief explanation of their solar system and its composition, but Hajime didn’t need her to tell him that information; he already knew. 

He hates every second of this. The remote is right there, only a foot away, all he has to do is click a single button and the screen will go dark. 

His hand doesn’t move. 

Instead, he thinks about a different life, one very similar to this one, where he would wake up at some small hour of the night to an empty bed and cold sheets, but when he made his way through the darkness there would be a soft light at the end of the hallway. The TV would already be clicked on with some random movie about space on the screen, the couch wouldn’t be empty, and a sleepy smile would emerge from blankets that smelled like fresh flowers. 

Hajime scrubs at his eyes. It seems as if the universe doesn’t want him to find peace tonight. 

It's this house, Hajime reasons with himself. Every grain of wood in the floorboards, every sheet of plaster in the walls, and every pane of glass in the windows is saturated in memories. The faint echoes of what once was, and everything that could have been, float around the halls like phantoms. They cling to Hajime’s shoulders, whispering in his ears. Day by day they get heavier, like shackles around his ankles that he is forced to drag behind him; he wonders if one day the burden will be too much, and he’ll either crumble under the pressure or be forced to stop trudging forward. 

There were days where Hajime felt like he could conquer the world. Nothing was out of his reach, the sky was his limit, all he had to do was jump high enough and he could run his fingers through the twinkling tails of stars shooting across the sky. 

How naive. 

Now, it's everything he can do to just lift his head. The stars have never felt farther away. 

He watches them float across the screen and feels the vast expanse of emptiness that stretches across the galaxies precipitate in his chest. An ever-growing desolate landscape sprouting in the gaps of his ribcage, taking root in his bones, and weaving its way around his lungs. It constricts when he breathes, and every second he’s awake, it grows in size. 

It’s insatiable, crawling through him and consuming every light and flame, leaving only darkness in its wake. A deep sinister lagoon without a bottom in sight. 

Before the murky depths can swallow him whole, Hajime plants his feet on solid ground and makes his way into the kitchen.

The rhythmic familiarity of putting the kettle on the stove helps him keep his head above water. He pulls a packet of tea out of the cabinet and reaches to grab a mug. As he lifts the white ceramic, his eye catches a glimpse of green in his peripheral. 

Without even realizing it, he sets the mug in his hand down and reaches for the other. His palm stings when he picks it up even though the clay is cold. 

It’s handmade; not perfect like the manufactured store bought one he just put back, the surface dips and dimples, molded by excited amateur fingers. The glaze is darker where it pooled in the divots, a gradient of lime to emerald green steeped into the surface. 

Hajime pours water over the teabag inside, barely letting the flavors diffuse before he takes a drink. It burns his tongue, but the sting covers up the bitter taste of bile in the back of his throat. 

This mug is far more accustomed to the deep rich aroma of freshly brewed coffee, but it holds his tea just fine. 

Every sip slides down his throat like poison, slowly killing him with memories of long-lost mornings in the kitchen, gilded in the golden light of the rising sun. 

Standing in the darkness, it’s hard to believe that at one point in time, pans on the stove sizzled with breakfast, and the tiles laid steady beneath the gentle rocking of dancing as the radio played their favorite songs. 

No music floats through the air now—silence, the new soundtrack to Hajime’s spiraling thoughts. 

Every part of his life used to be full of sound, whether it be idle chatter, absentminded humming, fingers drumming on the table, soft even sleeping breaths or the steady beating of a heart. 

The quiet stillness is disorienting, hanging like a fog in every room, and Hajime is just waiting for a cheery chirp to blow it all away like a strong spring breeze. Instead, it smothers him; he wants to call out, but when he opens his mouth it reaches in and snatches his voice. 

It’s not like there’s anyone around to listen anyways. 

Hajime pours the remnants of his tea down the drain and deposits his mug in the sink, leaving it’s cleaning for another day. 

He walks back into his room and crawls into bed; it’s just as cold as when he left it. 

Exhaustion permeates every cell in his body, but sleep dangles just out of his reach. 

It’s a double-edged sword. For a few blissful hours, he gets to escape dreariness that has soaked him all the way down to the marrow of his bones, but when he wakes up his traitorous brain always searches for sunlight, only to be met with more clouds saturated with rain. 

Even now, raindrops splatter onto his pillowcase, sliding down his cheeks and soaking the baby blue fibers. 

Hajime hides his face, from whom he doesn’t know. His ceiling, the universe, himself. He grits his teeth and tries to fight off the tidal wave threatening to capsize the tiny paper boat he’s taken refuge in. Holes litter the bottom, and no matter how quickly he bails water out, it continues to steadily leak inside. There is no life jacket. If he stops, he drowns, but his arms are heavy and the sea is calling his name. It would be nice to just float for a few moments, and maybe, the gentle rocking of the waves will bring him peace.

It's not a permanent solution, but if he slaps some tape over gaps, then perhaps he can endure another day. It only prolongs the problem, making it future Hajime’s issue, but these days he counts just surviving as a victory.

Hajime walks over to the dresser pressed up against the adjacent wall. The black wood is covered in a thin sheen of dust, unopened for weeks. He’s scared that if he cracks the drawers, all the demons and ghosts he’s been trying to lock away will spring free again. 

A soft gasp escapes his lips when he sees neatly folded t-shirts tucked away. It’s exactly what was he expecting, but it still shatters the threadbare composure he has been trying to salvage. His fingers twist around the first shirt he feels. It's soft, worn to the point of peak comfort—it smells like lavender and the mint shampoo that still sits in the corner of the shower untouched.

Hajime clutches it like a lifeline, hoping that if he wishes hard enough, it will stretch around long lanky arms and a solid chest.

It remains just as empty as he feels. 

His feet carry him to the balcony, and he sinks down into one of the chairs bought especially for long nights with clear skies. The other sits lonely, just waiting for its usual company.

Just two weeks ago, they sat here, pointing to the heavens, playing silly games like creating their own constellations and fantasizing about distant worlds light years away. 

It was something they had done as children and never grew out of. When life was too much, and gravity became a burden, one would tug the other out of the turmoil, and they would realign themselves under the stars and in each other.

“You know we’re all made of stardust Iwa-chan. We belong up there, but we accidentally fell down to earth. We’re all just dead stars looking back up at the sky.” 

Hajime had thought he was spouting his normal bullshit at the time, but then he saw how Tooru’s eyes sparkled in even the dimmest light, the way he lit up the world around them, how people couldn’t help but be drawn into his orbit. Hajime was made of flesh and bones, but Tooru, Tooru was made of something that never tarnished or dimmed. 

He laughed in starlight. Cried like a supernova. Loved with the burn of a thousand suns. 

Tooru had spent his whole life looking up at the stars.

“I know you loved them, but did you have to go see them so soon?” Hajime whimpers into the faded gray t-shirt tucked into his chest. 

When Hajime looks up at the night sky, he can’t bring himself to hate the pale silver light staring back down at him. One of those distant twinkles is watching over him, waiting to pluck him off the surface of the earth and pull him into a dance through the nebulas. 

Maybe the universe had felt a little too dark, and so, it pulled at its shiniest thread to stitch a new star into inky midnight that blankets the world. 

Hajime knows that one day they will find each other again. There are few things in life that are fact, unwavering in the turbulent ups and downs of human existence, but of this he is certain. 

He wishes they would have had more time together in this life, but in the grand scheme of forever, this is merely a tiny blip compared to eternity. Perhaps in a distant galaxy, or on a lonely lost comet, their souls will intertwine again. 

“I’ll find you again one day, I promise.” The words spill into the twilight. 

His entire life, Hajime had been staring at a single star—one with chestnut brown hair, dreams that couldn’t be tethered by reality, and eyes trained on the horizon. 

Tooru’s absence may be physical, but he will never truly be gone. His presence is woven into Hajime’s every thought, word, and touch. Everyone always told them that they were two halves of the same whole, Hajime supposes that he will just have to fill enough space for the both of them now. 

A breeze flutters across Hajime’s face, and if he closes his eyes, he can just barely make out a whisper: a promise. 

_I’ll be waiting._

It says. 

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/a_very_smolfrog) to yell at me for this.


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